Swagg.9236

Because, like I said, it's the only thing that people CAN do to "make Guardian/DH good" if you remove invisible, PBAoE-Man. GW2 is not a good game for buffing anything because nothing in GW2 is all that complex or interactive. The only yield from a GW2 skill buff is either nothing at all (because the buff didn't make the skill effortlessly warp the field) or an oppressive impact on the field (because there aren't very many subtle or universal interactions in GW2, so when one skill or build succeeds, it's almost guaranteed to be at the COMPLETE and UTTER expense of another player's efforts). Basically, only one person can have fun, and it's going to generally be the person whose build does the most with the least effort (if you can really call that fun--because apparently the GW2 community does). When people say "it's a shadow of its former self" or "you can't use it to hit anyone with half a brain," they're actually saying that it isn't completely fire-and-forget. That's what GW2 players want: fire-and-forget. I think that people who play this game "seriously" just attribute "skill factor" to a build's "fire-and-forget factors" being mildly restricted to limited-target attacks with cooldowns rather than a PBAoE that can techincally have an infinite duration if the user doesn't lay the latent PBAoE in a different location.

The only thing you could buff, however, is arguably the most shallow playstyle in GW2 (and possibly video games in general). It doesn't matter if Guardian doesn't have the spammable mobility buttons that Thief does; Guardian charges in and spams until it dies or kills something. It bursts quick after engaging and then either dies immediately or prolongs its death with various skills that grant protracted damage/effect negation. When you talk about "buffing" a no-trap-build Guardian, you're talking about working explicitly with this sort of kit--which means that you're basically going to have no choice but to make it deal so much damage so easily that it will successfully win fights despite being extremely low-effort and predictable. Once again and no more: you are going to have to entirely redesign what Guardian consistently brings to the table if you want to actually give it a worthwhile role; you can't just "buff" "things" to make Guardian "good" because you're only going to make it as oppressive and boring as something like sword/focus weaver. You need to STOP MAKING CLONES of things that already exist in the game--GW2 is already homogenized and oversaturated with bloat.

"GW2 'Trap' Utility Skills" are among the worst design paradigm for a cycle of abilities within video games. The worst part about Guardian's overall state as a class, however, is the fact that Trap DH is really just the logical conclusion of the way (offensive/damage) Guardian has always played: teleport at a guy and blast damage as fast as possible while relying on passive/instant blinds and blocks to sustain yourself before this sudden and twitchy trade of blows eventually swings in the opponent's favor. Damage Guardian has always been "blue thief." If you want an interesting, engaging or role-fulfilling Guardian build, you'll really have to rethink what sort of support that the class could potentially bring to the battlefield because, as it stands, Guardian is just one of many copies of the same class/playstyle; and the only reason is ever makes an appearance from time to time is because it has instant/passive access to perfect invisibility. In summary, don't think about "buffing" anything. Number adjustments will only continue what stealth trapper spawned. You need to entirely re-make that shallow, boring class.

This game never needed stealth to begin with, and there are far more creative ways to increase field presence or threat level via misdirection than vomiting some stealth over top of a bunch of face-roll buttons like Mesmer does now. The worst part is that alpha sword mainhand for Mesmer had this concept rolling better than anything pumped out via expansions or patch notes (it had imaginary leap--a clone attack--and a regular leap on separate cooldowns to allow for mix-ups--not to mention that meant that stock Mesmer sword mainhand once had free-aim mobility too).

The best thing to do with stealth is give it exclusively to Thief, tie it exclusively to an F-skill profession mechanic with a 1s cast and ammo (possibly also with an active cancel and an initiative maintenance cost/second), then re-work the "stealth" skill set into support and control (with a few, select instances of high damage) and spread them around utilities rather than tying them to weapon sets. It'd be easy enough to even do stuff like re-work Thief utilities into things like Druid glyphs (i.e. they're one thing while visible and another while in stealth). Point is, the problem with stealth is its inconsistent and ultimately random distribution, and the fact that it's generally passively or instantly applied with no real downside while active.

"Denature" is an interesting take on this proposal, but it's not like I don't use Unravel. I know exactly what it does, and I use it expressly for its obvious purpose in PvP on a zerker staff ele loadout. That's why I drew attention more toward the "75% attunement recharge reduction while active" aspect of the skill rather than towards the tick buffs (even acknowledging that they're probably overpowered/overtuned). Thinking about it more and playing with it again last night for a few games, I know why I hate the way that Unravel works, and it definitely comes down to the fact that after the initial attunement recharge reset, the player is still locked into that forced 4s recharge on all elements upon swapping. Doing actual cool stuff on staff REQUIRES that you swap rapidly and combine certain area control elements with damage or soft CC. The forced 4s Weaver recharge heavily muddles the ability for a player to do the only unique or remotely good thing that staff ele does (and I'm sure it's probably not too different for any other build). People in this thread have repeatedly said that Unravel is "adequate" because, a lot of times, it seems that they're fishing for panic buttons or a specific burst button when they use Unravel rather than trying to chain skills across several elements; and this utility allows them to do that. They aren't worried about several steps ahead across multiple elements, just one element in particular with the answer to whatever is happening on the field: it's ultimately a reactive playstyle (or, in the case of bursting, one which hits a dead-end very quickly after maybe two key buttons). Not to say that being able to pop Unravel reactively against certain threats is bad, but because it doesn't undo the Weaver 4s global cooldown on elements after the initial attunement recharge, it hampers the real potential that such a recharge might provide. Upon reading through the thread and playing the game again, I think I'd prefer if Unravel, during its duration (even if the duration were shortened a bit), further reduced the global Weaver cooldown on attunements so that players could swap more rapidly through their respective core weapon set toolkit: [Unravel] Recharge: 5s | Ammo: 2 Stance. Initial effect: Reduce all attunement cooldowns and gain swiftness. For a period of time, you fully attune to elements, and your attunements recharge faster. Gain bonuses at every interval while under this effect. - Initial Recharge Reduced: 100% - Initial Swiftness (8s): 33% Movement Speed - Unravel (4s): Fully attune to elements, temporarily lose dual attacks, and your attunement recharges are further reduced. - Attunement Recharge Reduced: 90% (resulting in about a 0.4s global CD for faster swapping) - Maximum Count: 2 - Count Recharge: 25s - Breaks Stun would even be enough considering how the main draw is just more weapon set flexibility. The boons are OK, but they're pretty generic and were originally just thrown on their haphazardly in a desperate attempt by anet to make people take the skill more often. If Unravel actually gave the player rapid and unfettered access to one's entire weapon kit, that on its own would probably be a good enough buff rather than relying on something as uninspired as "Look guys, i-it gives boons now! P-please use it!" I still think it deserves to grant baseline swiftness, though, because weaver can be slow as molasses sometimes while outside of combat; it's pretty awful. The stun break would be a nice addition as well, but it probably isn't super necessary.

So you'll just give up on potential player agency then? Sure, optimal combinations can exist, but why would you let certain things languish in a state of forced or arbitrary incongruity and irrelevance when there are absolutely means by which they could be changed in order to promote more synergy and player expression?

You've said the same thing as everybody else in this thread: "it's good for -CERTAIN- builds." I'm trying to make this good for every weapon loadout because it's a fun skill which can open up a lot of different interactions. I'll admit that the interval-tick part of this re-design is probably overpowered, but the main draw is that it would be really interesting to allow Elementalists to use Unravel to rapidly jump from element to element within its 5s duration (most issues regarding instant, passive trait damage shouldn't be a huge issue since most of them were nerfed). Honestly, at the very minimum, if the skill just gave swiftness (8s) in addition to everything else it does right now, I'd probably be happier with it; but as it stands, it works for d/X because d/X has passive damage mitigation; it works for scepter/dagger because Phoenix is easy-mode, near-instant burst AoE damage; and it works for X/focus because focus is cheese with a lot of panic buttons for stalling damage, and one of the most unfair CC attacks in the game. Since I was experimenting with it on staff, I noticed its shortcomings more than somebody who would be using a build that doesn't have as much instant damage and incoming effect mitigation passively built into it.

Sure, but you'll also just be sitting in earth (which doesn't often offer a lot on its own). I'd say that would be justification enough to keep it as it is, but then again, passive trash meme builds like Heart of Stone exist, so it'd probably be worth nerfing or changing it. I'm just not sure what else to put as an earth bonus (outside of maybe barrier, but that's so boring/predictable, and it's oversaturated within the most low-effort/popular weaver kit already).

It allows for clutch access to abilities in key moments, but it's still apparently functional only alongside niche weapon sets and their associated stat spreads (as you admit with your comment about sword builds). The point of this suggestion is to make Unravel viable for basically anybody wanting to experiment with that kind of flexibility. In fact, I've found some success in PvP using it on staff, but it's still, very clearly, not optimal despite how interesting the mechanic is with regards to the kind of mix-up interactions the player can generate by triggering certain bonuses or getting rapid access to certain skills. Unfortunately, that sort of agency is just not "viable" or "optimal" outside of certain scenarios--so it's probably best to adjust what Unravel provides in order to make up for that shortcoming. You can passively generate might in so many easy ways, justifying Unravel's overall suboptimal performance based entirely on how it gives the user might stacks is a pretty weak argument. It isn't about making the skill simplier; it's about having the skill provide something that the basic, meta-expectation weaver kit doesn't already bring to the table. Moreover, you again make my own arguement for me like other people have been doing in this thread: you explicitly reference specific traits, weapon sets, and internalizing CD timings. These sorts of things aren't intrinsic to expanding player agency: they're "good" (in GW2) because they're either passive (therefore, instant), set on fixed timers (i.e. part of a rotation--which doesn't require a lot of active thinking) or passively provide a lot of insulation from risk when taking actions (two people have already mentioned Unravel pairing with d/X, and I GUARANTEE you that's ONLY because d/X features free evades slapped onto movement/damage and not because "Unravel is good"). This version of Unravel's main draw wouldn't necessarily be the instant-gratification buffs along with access to a core weapon kit, but rather access to the core weapon kit along with the fact that all attunements would be reduced down to a baseline 1s. This would allow an Unravel ele to rapidly make decisions on the fly for a brief period of time regarding how to approach or evade certain situations. The 1s-interval tick bonuses are just gravy on top to make sitting in certain elements more practical than burning through the deck of weapon utility--it all comes down to context-specific decision making rather than reactivity (as you described with "easy access to shocking aura, or protection, or Water traits"). Sure, you could still be passive and reactive with this re-designed Unravel, but more than that you could be proactive in how you decide to affect the field by fielding combos or swapping back and forth between certain elements that otherwise wouldn't have been possible before.

[Unravel] Recharge: 5s | Ammo Count: 2 Stance. Initial effect: Reduce all attunement cooldowns and gain swiftness. For a period of time, you fully attune to elements, and your attunements recharge faster. Gain bonuses at every interval while under this effect. - Initial Recharge Reduced: 100% - Initial Swiftness (8s): 33% Movement Speed - Unravel (5s): Fully attune to elements; temporarily lose dual attacks; your attunement recharges are further reduced. At every interval, gain a bonus based on your current attunement. - Attunement Recharge Reduced: 75% - Interval: 1s - [Fire Attunement] Quickness (1¼s): Skills and actions are faster. - [Water Attunement] Endurance Gained: 15 - [Air Attunement] Superspeed (1½s): Movement Speed is greatly increased. - [Earth Attunement] Conditions Removed: 2 - Maximum Count: 2 - Count Recharge: 25s - Breaks Stun Bonus effect tick occurs at the start of every second, so the user will gain a bonus effect immediately upon activation according to whichever is the currently active attunement. While under the effects of Unravel, Elementalist Attunements recharge in 1s.

I mean, sure, but it doesn't make PvP itself actually good lol

Honestly, duo-queue makes it so easy to get top 250 with this dead community. Making everything solo-queue would maybe be the factor to push individual skill and legitimate communication/planning/foresight above sheer RNG as the consistent determining factor for ranked PvP (obviously, GW2 PvP will always be heavily influenced by RNG because nobody is forced to run "good" builds, but removing duo-queue might mitigate the oppression of this game's crippling weakness to third-party comms, team comp hard-counters and match-fixing).

Bunker builds are bad because they're gravity wells which yield far too much impact on the field for the effort that it requires to pilot them. In GW2, "bunkers" do nothing more than artificially lengthen combat because the "bunker" playstyle generally mimics solitaire even more heavily than the average meta PvP build: a bunker build is almost entirely reactive and simply exists to stall for time by negating the actions of other players on the field. Glass counters don't counter bunkers; timing counters bunkers. The only reason a bunker dies quickly is because it's out of buttons to press (because every bunker's effectiveness is grounded in a series of instant or near-instant negation or area-denial effects which combine with passive/instant healing). If a bunker has buttons to press, it's generally going to play its own game of solitaire until the buttons run out; it forces the entire field to play passively (by avoiding the trouble of grinding through bunker cooldowns) or unoptimally (ignoring more ideal targets to focus down a single guy who is basically just playing a low-effort game of whack-a-mole with his own HP bar). GW2 never had any build diversity to begin with, and that trend has never been addressed. Even as options expanded, you still see the same two or three build archetypes across every profession (that is, if a given profession can even assemble one or more of those builds out of its respective smattering of trait lines and weapon sets): damage, boon spam (almost strictly a PvE-only build), and effect/damage-negator (almost strictly a PvP-only build). The "healer" is so forcibly shoe-horned into this game that its mangled debut almost doesn't deserve to be called a proper archetype; but if you insist, I'll give you a total of four (4) true "roles" in GW2. Condition Damage is not a role. You could straight up just make all out-going damage scale off of Power, and then lower the strike damage associated with condi-heavy attacks in order to achieve the same effect as you do now with the currently worthless segregation of "Power Damage" and "Condition Damage." The only thing that truly separates those two """""damage types""""" is in how every skill bar has an "HP-restore" button slapped to it, but not every bar/build/profession can make room for a consistent, on-demand condition cleanse (which is an entirely arbitrary oversight that has no reason to exist). I could agree that it's worth finding a compromise between the single stat amulet of PvP and the garbage pile of random little boosts associated with the FOURTEEN (ONE-FOUR, 14) stat sources active on any given player with a full set of gear (16 if you count a second weapon set), but you really, ABSOLUTELY, do not need a lot of slots and unique stat combination options to go around in order to give any GW2 player access to exactly what they need for any given activity. I'd argue that isolating all stats to 3 trinket slots akin to the original PvP amulets with the minor stat option would be enough for every single mode this game has to offer. You could naturally get away with more if you wanted to throw a fit about it, but 6 sources (3 major and 3 minor respectively) is all you would really need; just adjust the stats provided by each source accordingly to match expectations for specific content. It's nothing more than a numbers game; GW2 is indeed that simplistic.

The fact that you can jump the attack is actually super cool. Nobody who plays GW2 PvP seriously would agree, though, and it's a shame that the only reason this is even remotely bad is because GW2 combat plays out like an isometric RPG despite touting itself as a multi-axis, dynamic-combat joy-ride. If people could manually aim anything along the z-axis, it wouldn't be a huge issue lmao.

I made a post about Catalyst which effectively said how anet tends to pile up bloat content in a corner, and how it would be really easy to simply make a single kit out of all of the good components that are isolated across the Elementalist's various weapons. I tried to limit myself from making too many huge overhauls (didn't completely succeed), but the point of this is to demonstrate how Elementalist (and every class for that matter) has a really interesting and fun kit to its name; the only catch is that the complete package is arbitrarily divided among several class-specific weapons, and individual elements of the kit are often trapped on sets that nobody uses (and sometimes on other classes/races entirely). For the purpose of this, I imagined that this particular Elementalist "mid-range" mock up would fit onto hammer (since the weapon itself doesn't actually matter; it's all just cosmetic at the end of the day). Most importantly, remember, this isn't about what someone (player or dev) thinks what the Elementalist should look like or sound like; it's about what makes a fun kit with a lot of options and agency. Let functionality come first, then you can put flavor over top of it. One last note: Catalyst's hammer orbs and the Jade Sphere variants could easily be turned into core glyphs; that's why they aren't a part of this kit. FIRE ATTUNEMENT Super basic and definitely the least interesting because it's mostly just damage; still offers a generally higher threat level and more mobility than current Fire Attunement kits. WATER ATTUNEMENT Water fields for support coupled with area control, some CC and a conditional damage option for field pressure and projectile mitigation. AIR ATTUNEMENT Super mobile with a high channel uptime due to the second slot skill. Always something to do and a lot of pressure to apply while in this attunement. EARTH ATTUNEMENT Super mobile with strong AoE and a number of CC options. Second slot skill synergizes with CC in order to deal burst/finisher damage.

The worst part is that nothing that comes out of GW2 is complex; you just have a warehouse of the same main idea that's painted different colors and each arbitrarily assigned better or worse numbers.

They were just self-applied passives with fixed durations which could grant a conditional bonus if you activate them while inside of your F5 skill's active AoE. The only remotely "decent" one was the fire-based utility because it just increased your outgoing damage (the other ones were entirely irrelevant because they either provided worthless effects or granted a bonus which could be achieved--or outperformed--by other skills which already exist). The fundamental concept honestly wasn't completely awful (dedicate utility skills to give a bonus to specific elemental attunements), but the execution was horridly janky (elemental attunement cooldowns combined with the spammy, rotation-based nature of GW2's combat will almost always prevent on-demand access to the best bonuses) and ultimately doomed to failure because there are simply not that many "unique effects" that GW2 can have any player provide anymore (hence why all of the utility bonuses are either super generic or unimpressive). The end result is five skills which feel more like a single GM trait rather than something worth occupying a skill slot.

The Catalyst 3 skills and Jade Orb are utility skills (both could be glyphs); they are neat and interesting, but they are absolutely not worthy of being super-exclusive features which ought to define an entire, isolated sub-class. The actual Catalyst utility skills are boring garbage on their own; could have all been combined into a low-cooldown elite skill (or another, single utility skill). Hammer is an half-baked concept that features a few interesting abilities/interactions tied together with flashy attacks that don't really do much. It's too easy to identify and combine the few good, synergetic elements across Elementalist hammer, sword, daggers, and scepter respectively into a single weapon set that's actually fun and impactful rather than just letting an absolute garbage pile of unused content to build up and rot in a corner (because dagger/focus and sword/focus is just too rewarding for the effort they demand). Unfortunately, beyond just the weapon design issues, GW2 is generally already ruled by passive effects which override player expression and parasitically benefit only a stiflingly narrow scope of "playstyles"; this is another reason why we see so little practical weapon variety.

OP isn't wrong. GW2 doesn't provide a lot of space for players to express themselves and evolve. The only people who stick with this game and (try to) take it seriously are those with a semi-public profile or platform. Everybody else can quickly recognize the artificial nature of GW2's pvp interactions. If you don't quit outright after a month or so, you either become a deluded attention seeker or you burn out.

I must have misinterpreted your intent, then. More often than not, it seems that the GW2 playerbase likes to pretend that slapping extra damage onto skills, baking in some passive evasion/blocking or lowering cast times are the keys to making underutilized weapons "good" or "rewarding" in this game. I share your sentiment about how staff ele feels a little more engaging than basically any other setup in this game. That said, spamming skills off CD is tragically just the way GW2 was designed to operate, and it doesn't seem like anet or the playerbase is willing to admit that there are any problems with that paradigm or consider changing it in any significant way. You'll need to instead change staff in a way to affect the fact that opponents are just going to faceroll the keyboard regardless of what they target (ala a full-bar GW1 Assassin chain). I drew this up ages ago because I just wanted staff to do what it has always done but still manage to have a few answers to all the easy mode bs built into every build in GW2. https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/51430-staff-buffs/

GW2 is a very binary game, and it has traditionally relied on number adjustments to "balance" PvP content. The problem is that this design philosophy only results in two distinct phases for any given build: exceedingly oppressive and overrepresented by the community, or ineffective against the former and thus abandoned by the community.

Welcome to the crux of the issue regarding GW2's PvP at large. You'll find that this sort of paradigm is reflected in every single build--meta or otherwise. You'll also see, judging by the forum reactions, that you're probably going to be derided for speaking the truth rather than invited to open discussion about why GW2 has the design issues that it does.

All elite skills in GW2 are lame. Zero-resource cooldowns that tend to inherently warp the field without any real effort beyond pressing a single button are generally dumb and unhealthy for interactive combat.

The ability to effortlessly cast overload skills doesn't magically make the baseline capabilities of something else "good" by association; and making everything about staff either resolve faster or hit harder is just playing into the same demands that have consistently made GW2 worse over its lifepsan. Staff is probably one of the few decent weapon kit designs in GW2, and the reason why it feels super limited is because it's fair; it's part of a team-centric playstyle rather than the current metagame's low-effort, one-man-army which tends to work like a solitaire game rather than promoting actual interactions between PvP participants.